December 16, 2004

Google Print

My initial reaction to Google Print is that it is a brilliant and
democratic move with a diverse set of benefits. My second reaction was
to hum the tune to "m-i-c-k-e-y m-o-u-s-e"

Copyright protection is a mess in the US. (The only bigger
intellectual property mess being business process and software
patents.) Congress has extended the length of time that a copyrighted
work is protected 11 times! So how long does the creator of a
particular expression of an idea get these days?

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hlc
A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time)
on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment
of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the
author's life plus an additional 70 years after the author's death...
For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works ...
the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120
years from creation, whichever is shorter.

So an author gets between 70 and 120 years of protection! That
makes the 20 years of protection for patents look meager. Basically the
story goes that everytime Mickey Mouse was about to lose copyright
protection, Disney would unleash an arsenal of lobbyists to protect
their crown jewel.

What will be the impact be on Google Print?
It would be a shame if Google Print only had books older than 70 years
old! Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms would be available (published in
1926) but we would have to wait another 18 years to read The Old Man
and the Sea (1952).

I was excited to read in teh NYTimes article that "At least a
dozen major publishing companies, including some of the country's
biggest producers of nonfiction books - the primary target for the
online text-search efforts - have already entered ventures with Google
and Amazon that allow users to search the text of copyrighted books
online and read excerpts."

But a few paragraphs later there is this little torpedo: "The
Amazon and Google programs work by restricting the access of users to
only a few pages of a copyrighted book during each search, offering
enough to help them decide whether the book meets their requirements
enough to justify ordering the print version. Those features restrict a
user's ability to copy, cut or print the copyrighted material, while
limiting on-screen reading to a few pages at a time. Books still under
copyright at the libraries involved in Google's new project are likely
to be protected by similar restrictions."

Time will tell how this will be resolved. With any luck it won't take 70 years.